Designing Innovation: Interviews at Legion Park

Interviews at Legion Park Farmer’s market

Today our team took a short road trip to Legion Park to meet Art Friedrich and Jeannie Necessary with Urban Oasis Project and with Roger Horne of Urban Greenworks.

I felt it was a great success. We first interviewed Art and Jeannie chimed in once so, I made a note to follow-up with her because she had some interesting things to say about health literacy and how campaigns really don’t work.

Art’s interview was revealing in that perhaps the term “food desert” isn’t the best term to use especially when talking with people who live in communities designated as such. He mentioned that it may further discrimminate. That brought to mind a term I read about while visiting the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum earlier this year. I’m still searching for the photo I made but if memory serves, it had to do with how labels can make a person start to believe they don’t deserve x, y, or z.

Roger Horne is quite a force. When he launched with how he approaches food security with a more holistic mindset, that resonated with me. Why? Because I don’t believe in things — good or bad — occurring in isolation. There are reasons why and it is important to understand them; including human behavior.

My teammate, Mackenzie was kind enough to offer transcription of the interviews so as soon as those are ready my next step is to read, synthesize, and ideally translate into a better understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.

This is Part 4 in a series documenting my learning experiences developing a solution to address food deserts, food security, health literacy, and health for populations. This project is part of our Designing Innovation course with Professor Lien Tran at the University of Miami, School of Communication. I am an IMFA (Interactive Media Master of Fine Arts) candidate.